Share this:

Jessica Lange (left) and Dustin Hoffman did it right in the ’82 film “Tootsie.” After years of being stymied by Hoffman, the Broadway musical version is struggling to find a creative team. Photo:

Down the dismal roads of a post-apocalyptic landscape travel five good-looking actors toting guns and machetes. They are fleeing a dystopian plot device, which in this case happens to be roving bands of cannibals but could have been zombies or mummies or radioactive Persian cats. The group happens upon a deserted farmhouse, where they’re soon besieged.

“The Day” suffers a bit of an identity crisis. Does it want to be a knowing pastiche, in the style of director Doug Aarniokoski’s mentor Robert Rodriguez? Suggesting “yes” are the costumes — which could go from cannibal death-match to Williamsburg nightclub without a single alteration — and the signature pirouettes that proceed every machete blow.

Or does the movie want to say something about humanity in a state of nature, like the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road”? Sodden conversations (“However did we come to this, and what separates us from them?”) lend weight to this theory.

The film feels unbelievably long at 84 minutes, and the color-drained, hand-held cinematography serves only as a reminder of just how good “Night of the Living Dead” really was.

The sole intrigue comes from Ashley Bell as Mary, a fighter with a secret. A small-boned woman composed largely of muscle, Bell has a granite stare that could make Clint Eastwood flinch. She stomps through “The Day” in over-the-knee boots and a short floral dress, daring you to doubt that she could hoist a cannibal by his own meat hook.